The Toronto Star has a story in the Insight section today; "Can't stay silent on oppression of Uyghurs."
We meet Andrea and Gary, NGO workers from small-town Manitoba, who spent ten years doing poverty alleviation in Xinjiang. "They are now speaking out about the horrors they witnessed..."
Among the horrors they witnessed were Muslim girls being forced to remove their head-coverings at a flag-raising ceremony. Oh, the beastliness of that depraved communist regime! Who can even imagine such a thing?
Almost reminds one of Quebec!
The most interesting thing about the story is that Joanna Chiu and Jeremy Nuttall completely gloss the fact that Andrea and Gary went to China as missionaries, now known as "holistic development workers" in do-gooder babble. When the Lord called them back to Manitoba to run the Mennonite Heritage Village, this bio appeared on the local news site.
This is not an oversight, but a deliberate strategy. Would our knowing that these whistle-blowers were Christian missionaries enhance or diminish the credibility of the story? I think the vast majority of readers would assume that such people are predisposed to show godless communism in the worst possible light.
As journalism, this is pretty slip-shod stuff.
As propagandists, Chiu and Nuttall made the right call.
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